WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:28.960 Ancient weapons are a thing of the past, but for Joel Dickinson of Green Bay, their 00:28.960 --> 00:34.560 ingenuity is timeless. 00:34.560 --> 00:37.360 Most people probably don't even know what an adult adult is. 00:37.360 --> 00:43.560 Most people would know it as the spear thrower. 00:43.560 --> 00:50.040 Thousands of years before the first bowstring, the adult adult was the Great Equalizer, a 00:50.040 --> 00:53.160 high velocity invention of the Ice Age. 00:53.160 --> 00:58.160 What that allowed us to do was hunt at a greater distance, which allowed us to keep ourselves 00:58.160 --> 01:03.960 safe from the animal that we're trying on. 01:03.960 --> 01:09.560 That prehistoric engineering is reborn in Joel's basement workshop. 01:09.560 --> 01:15.480 I make replicas of ancient weaponry, I make stone tools, clubs, adult adult spears. 01:15.480 --> 01:21.640 He forges a lethal edge from a stubborn shard of obsidian, bridging the present day with 01:21.640 --> 01:23.960 the ancient past. 01:23.960 --> 01:30.720 They must have had infinite patience and curiosity and great knowledge. 01:30.720 --> 01:35.920 I could turn this into a knife if I wanted, I could turn it into a spear if I wanted. 01:35.920 --> 01:44.880 It's extremely sharp. 01:44.880 --> 01:52.440 Each chip is an echo from the Ice Age, turning raw material into weapons that once stood 01:52.440 --> 01:56.800 as the only thing between humanity and extinction. 01:56.800 --> 01:58.960 We were a hunter and we were a prey. 01:58.960 --> 02:06.360 We stood shoulder to shoulder with the best predators of the day. 02:06.360 --> 02:15.400 The predators captured Joel's imagination, but an illustration captured his attention. 02:15.400 --> 02:22.720 I came to this page in particular and it has a bunch of Pleistocene-era animals. 02:22.720 --> 02:30.440 We have the mammoth and the mastodon here, giant sloth, giant armadillo, American bison, 02:30.440 --> 02:32.960 and the very bottom is a little human. 02:32.960 --> 02:34.560 I was just awestruck. 02:34.560 --> 02:36.560 We existed alongside all these beasts. 02:36.560 --> 02:44.640 It just blew me away and as a child, I was always fascinated with ancient weaponry. 02:44.640 --> 02:48.760 And the rest, as they say, is ancient history. 02:48.760 --> 02:53.680 These little purple arrowheads are the first ones I ever made. 02:53.680 --> 02:54.680 That's Flint. 02:54.680 --> 02:56.920 This is what they would have used here in Wisconsin. 02:56.920 --> 02:59.520 We didn't have obsidian in Wisconsin. 02:59.520 --> 03:05.600 Joel actually taught himself how to make these prehistoric tools by reverse engineering 03:05.600 --> 03:07.560 timeless traditions. 03:07.560 --> 03:12.280 A lot of trial and error, they needed to know how to nap an arrowhead. 03:12.280 --> 03:16.840 They needed to know how to make sinew and process it. 03:16.840 --> 03:19.240 They needed to know how to make pine tar pitch. 03:19.240 --> 03:25.720 When they find ancient arrowheads, the fingerprints are still stuck in the pine tar pitch that 03:25.720 --> 03:27.840 they use. 03:27.840 --> 03:35.160 That's what made us a fierce beast, is our intellectual capacity to know how to take 03:35.160 --> 03:40.520 the things up from our environment, the stones and the pine tar pitches and the sinews and 03:40.520 --> 03:45.280 combine it into making ourselves a very lethal and effective weapon. 03:45.280 --> 03:51.720 Besides weapons, Joel also crafts handmade instruments, reclaiming the music that sings 03:51.720 --> 03:56.600 to his ancient soul. 03:56.600 --> 04:04.840 Birdbone one here, it's a little bit higher pitch. 04:04.840 --> 04:12.800 And then the bull roar, that's what the crocodile Dundee used. 04:12.800 --> 04:20.240 This goes back about 50,000 years, so you can communicate over a distance. 04:20.240 --> 04:26.160 That connection to the past has traveled through the millennia, passing from hand to hand until 04:26.160 --> 04:27.720 it reached Joel. 04:27.720 --> 04:28.880 I get a connection. 04:28.880 --> 04:33.920 I get a connection to all those people that have come before me, all my ancestors. 04:33.920 --> 04:40.800 It's been able to do something that my ancestors did 10,000 years ago. 04:40.800 --> 04:55.400 Joel guards these primeval lessons and realizes it is these raw instincts that make us human. 04:55.400 --> 04:58.760 I think there's that urge to sometimes want to be primal. 04:58.760 --> 05:10.200 To take an ad-lattle and let that baby go and watch it soar in the air. 05:10.200 --> 05:15.440 It's almost like time traveling in a sense where you get to experience something that 05:15.440 --> 05:21.720 is an ancient thing and it's cool. 05:21.720 --> 05:27.200 That allows you to kind of picture yourself in another time and another place and say, 05:27.200 --> 05:30.640 you know, I could have done this, I could be brave.